Unreal City (28 page)

“It was nothing―just had a weird dream, that’s all,” Penny told her with a yawn and her mother gasped with intrigue. Penny ignored her and moved to the closet to arrange the day’s ensemble.

“A dream? Was it unusual?”

Penny scoffed a little under her breath and suppressed the urge to roll her eyes as she inspected a skirt from her bedroom floor, then tossed it aside. “It
was
pretty vivid actually, but―”

Penny was interrupted by an excited giggle from her mother. “Hold that thought―I’ll go get the dream dictionary. It could be a sign! We’ve got to interpret it while the imagery is still fresh in your mind. Sit tight!” Her mother tramped back downstairs, muttering to herself.

Penny shook her head as she pulled a jacket and striped shirt from her closet and slunk to the bathroom. As she got dressed and brushed her teeth, her mother returned to lob question after question about her dream through the bathroom door. Penny slapped water onto her pale, heart-shaped face and smoothed her hair as she answered. Her wide blue eyes and youthful features suggested she was younger than her actual age of twenty.

“A spider, huh? It says you have a good chance of finding money or getting a letter from an old friend,” Paulina muttered, her excitement palpable even through the closed door.

Penny tried to focus on her mother’s words as she did her best to tame her short, wiry black hair. This was a familiar ritual with her mother.
At least she isn’t trying to cast a spell to keep me safe from inauspicious omens today,
Penny thought before she opened the bathroom door.

“Lookin’ good, kid,” Paulina said in a chipper voice, looking over Penny’s skinny, boyish frame swimming within her jacket. “Need me to drive you over to the college today?”

“No thanks, Maddie’s picking me up,” Penny said as she descended the stairs. It was a cozy house with just enough room to move around in. Penny much preferred it to the dingy apartment on the other side of town that they had occupied before. There was something charming about the sleepy little neighborhood where they’d settled.

“Oh well, I need to get to the shop anyway,” Paulina sighed. “Remember, you’ve got to be there too right after class because my plane leaves around five and heaven knows I’m going to need extra time. I
know
I’ve forgotten something. I always forget something.”

Penny stopped on her way to the kitchen.
Of course―Mom’s going to see Grandma this weekend.
Penny shook her head, which still seemed to be filled with cotton, and scanned the counter to see if there were any muffins left. The kitchen smelled of exotic spices and sunlight poured in through the windowpanes, dappling the many aromatic herbs and flowers that her mother grew to sell in their store.

Penny grinned when she found a wealth of fresh muffins on the counter and plucked up her favorite—banana nut. She turned to leave, stopping when she noticed her mother collapsing into the chair beside the kitchen table, rubbing her temple.

“Is something wrong?” Penny asked, drawing closer. It wasn’t at all like Paulina to react this way about seeing Penny’s grandmother; she more often than not spoke of the woman with a kind of forced optimism.

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve just had a little bit of a headache since I woke up…I think it might be a migraine coming on…” her mother mumbled.

Penny stood by her for a moment, bewildered. “A migraine?” she inquired, surprised. “You never get migraines.”

Paulina shrugged. “Never too late to start, I guess―anyway, you’d better get outside. Madeline will be here any second and you don’t want to keep her waiting.”

“Well, don’t work too hard. See you later.” Penny waved to her mother, swept up her book bag that lay by the door, and slipped outside.

Penny grimaced upward as she took a bite out of her muffin. Gloomy blankets of deep gray clouds covered the Oregon sky and the humidity was palpable in the autumn air. She hummed as she took a seat on the curb in front of her house and stared at the whispering woods growing alongside the houses on Hillshire Lane. Her mind flashed to the image of a twitching mess of legs being extricated from her body cavity and a sick feeling washed over her.

As she sat waiting, Penny thought she sensed a peculiar heaviness pressing down from somewhere high in the sky, as if a huge balloon, filling with air, was threatening to pop. The wind whistled by and brought a flurry of burnt orange leaves with it. The nippy breeze succeeded in undoing any progress that Penny had made in arranging her hair.

Something feels really off today. Maybe all that prophetic dream junk she always talks about might actually mean something for once,
Penny mused
.

Heavy moisture clung to her cheek. The clouds were swollen with rainwater, and the only sound was the rattling of dead leaves blowing across the gravel. Penny shook her head again and smirked at herself.

Yeah, right. If anyone hangs around Mom enough they’ll start looking for cosmic messages in alphabet soup. It was just a stupid dream; I shouldn’t let it get to me. I’ve gotta cheer up―it’s Friday, after all.

It was those insignificant moments she spent, sitting alone on the curb, which Penny would always think back on after the end of her life on Earth; the simple act of staring into the pines with her peace yet unbroken, while the wind raced onward to wherever it was destined to die.

THE QUIET OF
morning was disturbed as a car glided around the corner and the chorus of an 80s rock song rang out through the neighborhood. Penny stood and waved to the driver as the car rolled up alongside her and stopped. She yanked open the door and jumped into the passenger seat, then lowered the volume with a brisk turn of the knob before looking over at Madeline.

“Glad to see you’re cheerful as usual,” Madeline said with equal parts mirth and annoyance, her pink star-shaped earrings swinging as she drove off. Madeline’s wispy blonde hair hung around her shoulders and her blue eyes scanned the road, buried under vibrant pink eye shadow. She was a striking beauty and this often proved to be a source of insecurity for Penny.

“So, I think I’ll be getting a solid B for today’s essay. How’d yours turn out?” Penny asked, though she already had an idea what the answer might be.

Madeline gave a derisive laugh and turned the music back up. “I didn’t even do it—practice ran late. Besides, Arlington is crazy if he thinks any normal person can handle this workload. Why do teachers always seem to think that we only have
one
class to keep up with?” she scoffed.

“He
is
kind of ridiculous, I’ll admit, but all the same…you probably shouldn’t just blow it off,” Penny replied, her words transforming into a massive yawn.

Madeline shot her a look. “Let me guess. You stayed up all night again, didn’t you? Please,
please
tell me you’re not reading that girl-power detective series for the fourth time,” she moaned.

“Fifth,” Penny mumbled under her breath.

“Wow. You
still
haven’t changed since the sixth grade,” she teased.

Penny ignored her comment. For the rest of the drive, she listened and nodded as Madeline told her about all the praise her dance instructor had given her last night.

Twin Rivers Community College was a small, out-of-the-way school hidden among the overgrowth of trees that crowded the Oregon town. The buildings were dilapidated, weatherworn, and charmless.

Madeline parked and they made their way toward the campus, the biting chill on the wind carrying invisible droplets of rainwater. Halfway across the parking lot, Penny noticed Madeline stumbling and raised her eyebrows. Her friend’s face had taken on a peaky color and her usual spunky nature seemed strained.

“You okay?” Penny asked.

“Yeah… I just started feeling a little messed up―bad headache. It’s this drab weather,” she said in a shaky voice and smiled, trying to recapture her usual level of energy.

Penny’s brow furrowed. “My mom had a headache, too. I’ll bet something’s going around. Don’t come near me, I can’t get sick this close to midterms.” She drew away from Madeline.

“I just hope I can make it through Arlington’s class without falling asleep. As if it wasn’t miserable enough already,” Madeline sighed. They wove through the thin crowd of students shuffling their way to class, and drops of cold rain began to splash down.

“Argh! Let’s hurry!” Penny exclaimed, using her book bag as an umbrella. They sped over the misty grounds until they reached the overhang outside their classroom and scurried indoors, dripping all the way over to their seats.

It was a cramped, square classroom with twenty or so desks crammed into it. A young man in the front row stared in a stupor at the words their professor scribbled onto the blackboard with chalk. A group of girls in the seats behind Penny shrieked with laughter at something on the screen of a cell phone they were passing around. Professor Arlington set the chalk down with a curt click and swiveled around to face the class. He was a willowy young man with soft, mousy brown hair that hung in an elegant curtain to his chin. A pair of round glasses were always sliding down his nose; Madeline sometimes kept a tally when she was particularly bored. Since he was skinny and rather tall, he had something of a stretched look about him. He clapped his hands together and peered around at the class with a half-smile.

“All right, everybody. I trust you’ve all been working long and hard on your papers, yes? Did anyone have a particularly exciting thesis they’d like to share?” he asked in his usual brisk tone, his hopeful smile fading when nobody so much as blinked an eye in response. Penny could almost feel Madeline’s annoyance radiating off her.

Penny felt a little sorry for their professor―she had taken a liking to him and his optimistic efforts to teach literature to a group of people that had little to no interest in the subject. While Madeline classified him as ‘intolerable’, Penny harbored a quiet admiration for his enthusiasm. Yet with the unrelenting workload he assigned, she could understand why he was scorned by the majority of the students. Professor Arlington sighed before moving to collect the papers from the six or seven people who’d bothered to complete the assignment. Penny held her paper up as he walked by and Professor Arlington added it to the stack, and then halted, swiveling his head back to look at her. Penny felt a bit peeved at his apparent surprise; she was one of the few students who could be relied upon to complete every assignment. His pace slowed significantly, and Penny worried she’d fall asleep before he made it back to his desk.

At the front of the classroom, Professor Arlington turned and looked around the room. Penny watched him in a sleepy daze. Madeline’s head was down on her desk and the rest of the class had already assumed their usual coma-like positions in anticipation of his lecture. The professor’s eyes skimmed across Penny and he rubbed his forehead, his expression strained.

“Class…is dismissed,” he said in a quiet voice.

Startled, Penny sat up and blinked in astonishment. He had never dismissed, let alone cancelled, a class before. Half of the class straightened up but stayed silent, now rapt with attention. Professor Arlington appeared even more uncomfortable when no one stirred.

“Did I misspeak? Class is dismissed!” he repeated with sharper enunciation, his face growing chalky.

“But―sir,” a girl from the back spoke up. “We just got here―”

“I am quite aware of that, Miss Winslow. Please, all of you, leave.”

In a state of befuddlement, the students started to pack up. Penny rose from her seat, took her book in hand and strode from the classroom with Madeline close beside.

“What was that all about?” Penny asked, still surprised. “Do you think he’s mad no one did the essay?”

“Maybe he got sick, I don’t know,” Madeline said with disinterest.

“He didn’t look sick, he looked upset,” Penny insisted, reaching for her bag to prepare for another sprint through the drizzle. She stopped short. “Oh no—I left my bag!”

“Then go get it,” Madeline said, exasperated. “I’m cold and my head hurts. Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

Uneasy about intruding on her professor after he’d ordered them to leave, Penny plucked up her courage, doubled back, and cracked open the door. When she peeked inside, her heart all but stopped beating.